“Seçim ile gelip, seçim ile giderler. “They came through the ballot box, they will leave through the ballot box. »
From Washington, where he now lives, Kemal Kirişci hopes Turkish voters have remembered this famous maxim as they prepare to vote on Sunday in what the magazine The Economist dubbed “the most important election of the year” on the planet.
And for good reason. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president who makes rain and shine in the country of 85 million inhabitants, could be shown the door after 20 years in power.
PHOTO UMIT BEKTAS, REUTERS
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, outgoing President of the Republic of Türkiye
The polls give him neck and neck with his main opponent, Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu, a 74-year-old politician who is the candidate from a six-party coalition.
“These elections are an opportunity for Turkish society to show its attachment to democracy. Against all odds,” says Kemal Kirişci, who, after teaching international relations at Bogaziçi University in Istanbul, headed the “Turkey Project” at the Brookings Institution, a prestigious research center in Washington.
Against all odds ? Mr Kirişci, who speaks impeccable French, predicts that Sunday’s vote will not pass like a letter in the post if the opposition does not win decisively, either by more than 4 or 5% in advance .
In 2019, when an opposition candidate, Ekrem Imamoğlu, narrowly defeated Erdoğan’s colt in a closely contested election for Istanbul mayor, the president literally had the election annulled.
Voters held firm and handed a landslide victory to Mr Imamoğlu when the polls resumed. If he had a lead of 13,000 votes in the first vote, he finally won the bet with a gap of more than 800,000 votes.
However, the new mayor was not at the end of his troubles. Turkish justice, which is under the control of the president and his political allies, sentenced him to more than two years in prison for having “insulted electoral officials”, a sentence which could exclude him from political life.
This controversial sentence has not yet been carried out and Mr. Imamoğlu is currently a candidate for the vice-presidency. Its countryside is anything but a large, tranquil Bosphorus. On Sunday in Erzurum, voters threw rocks at him as he tried to take part in a political rally.
His case, which says a lot about the state of democracy in Turkey, is also a bad omen.
Many observers of Turkish politics fear that the repression and violence he faces will spread across the country after Sunday’s vote.
Turkey finds itself at a crossroads. On one path, that of the current president, there is a state in which power is increasingly centralized in the hands of a single person. A country in which 33 journalists and hundreds of political opponents are currently imprisoned. An ally that blocks Sweden’s accession to NATO and that maintains its relations with China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Ukraine at the same time. A political system in which Parliament has no bite, justice is not independent and the press is muzzled.
PHOTO MURAD SEZER, REUTERS ARCHIVES
Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu, candidate for the Turkish presidency
What does the other side offer? Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu and his political allies promise to press the “reset” button and restore the democratic institutions that have been largely discarded since the constitutional reform carried out by President Erdoğan in 2017. They also promise to release political prisoners, to defend the freedom of the press and the rights of the LGBTQ community.
Of course, for the moment, the promises of the opposition are just that, promises. The coalition of six parties, baptized the Alliance of the nation, casts a wide net. Among them are Islamo-conservatives, nationalists, liberals and leftists.
Mr. Kiliçdaroğlu’s party, the CHP, founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, has not always been a great champion of democracy, aggressively imposing the secularism of the state and repressing the country’s Kurdish minority, hand in hand. hand with the military.
A party often associated with the pro-European elite, the CHP has also long neglected the less well-off in the country and the most conservative sections of society.
It was this exclusion that brought Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to power in 2002. At the time, the former mayor of Istanbul and soccer champion was a beacon of hope for tens of millions of Turks who could take more of this sclerotic system. The economic boom that followed his assumption of the post of prime minister allowed Turkey to dream big. Even the conflict with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) seemed to be over when I covered the 2011 parliamentary elections there.
Unfortunately, since 2013, this dream has faded and the authoritarian methods of yesteryear have gradually resurfaced, while at the same time autocracy was gaining ground across the world, from Russia to Brazil to the Philippines.
Fortunately, in Türkiye, there are always ballot boxes. Those who give power and can take it back. Against all odds.